View full sizeRoss William Hamilton/The OregonianMichael LaFountain, 13, (left), brother David Langley, 9, and mom Shannon Langley shop at the Powell's set up inside Wordstock, the northwest's largest book and literary festival.

The Wordstock literary
festival has a little bit of everything -- movies, manifestos,
broadsides, brilliant metaphors and plenty of people browsing for books.

Saturday afternoon, Portland filmmaker Andy Mingo and his crew shot
scenes for "Georgie's Big Break," a short movie based on a story by Monica Drake,
while poet Walt Curtis stood on a chair giving a loud, dramatic reading
of "Status Rerum," a 1927 manifesto on the sorry state of Pacific
Northwest literature. The filmmakers were unfazed by Curtis, and he was
too busy howling the words of H.L. Davis and James Stevens to notice
them.

Davis, whose "Honey in the Horn" is the only novel by an Oregonian to
win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and Stevens, author of "Paul Bunyan,"
thought Northwest literature was "a vast quantity of bilge" and a
"seemingly interminable avalanche of tripe." They weren't shy about
saying so, and Curtis and the other members of the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission
weren't shy about reading "Status Rerum" as loudly as they could. Their
words didn't carry in the sterile atmosphere of the Oregon Convention
Center, where several readings and panel discussions were going on at
once.

"Is there something about the climate or the soil which inspires people to write tripe?" asked Davis and Stevens. "Is there some occult influence, which catches them young and shapes them to be instruments out of which tripe, and nothing but tripe, may issue?"

Northwest literature has come a long way since 1927, and examples of its vitality were everywhere at Wordstock. Anthony Doerr, who lives in Boise and has written four books, had the metaphor of the day when he said writing a novel "feels like carrying a bunch of pancake batter. It's always dripping out of my hands." Doerr was on a panel about writing short stories, something he has done masterfully in two books, "The Shell Collector" and "Memory Wall." He said short stories have "a different level of impact, maybe a greater impact" than novels.

As soon as Doerr and the other panelists finished on the Columbia Sportswear Stage, Larry Colton took over. Colton put his own writing career on hold six years ago when he founded Wordstock but stepped back to finish his book "No Ordinary Joes: The Extraordinary True Story of Four Submariners in War and Love and Life."

Colton invited his agent, Richard Pine, and his editor, Sydny Miner, onstage to talk about how a book goes from idea to publication. Pine was full of good advice and said, "Nonfiction is really the bulk of publishing. There's a never-ending hunger for information and for stories about people." Colton said he knew nothing about the subjects of his last two books, "Counting Coup" and "No Ordinary Joes," but "had a passion for the story" that carried him through.

The current novel that would make Davis and Stevens eat their words is Brian Doyle's "Mink River." It's the first original fiction published by Oregon State University Press, and Doyle was thrilled to hear that Isabel Allende reportedly got a copy last week at a Northern California bookstore.

"It took me 20 years to write," Doyle said. "It's a short story that got out of hand." He said he got a note from a reader complaining about his long sentences and joked that "there's a period on Page 140."

At the Copper Canyon Press booth, there was plenty of poetry for sale that would impress the "Status Rerum" authors. The first books by Portland poets Matthew and Michael Dickman have just been reprinted, and their friend Carl Adamshick was picking up some new books before his first book comes out next year. Copper Canyon was offering a Wordstock special: a free broadside with a $50 purchase. The hot seller was a signed broadside of "A Happy Birthday" by Ted Kooser, a former U.S. poet laureate.

A broadside is a poem artfully designed and lettered and printed on a poster board. "Status Rerum" is not available as a broadside, but the Cultural Heritage Commission was selling copies for 25 cents.